-: My name is Lee-Sean Huang,
I'm Director of Design Content and Learning here at AIGA,
the professional association for design.
Today, we are doing an online book event,
you're in the right place.
So we're gonna be talking about this book "Caps Lock",
how capitalism took hold of graphic design
and how to escape from it published by Valiz.
This event is presented by AIGA
and our partners at Artbook DAP.
You can get a copy of "Caps Lock" on artbook.com,
using coupon code AIGA member 25 for 25% off.
Our presenter today is based
in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
He describes himself as a designer
at a moment in time when more design is
about the last thing the world needs.
And in search for ethical alternatives to design
as we know it in the mainstream,
he practices design, he writes and he teaches.
You can find him in his work online under
the name Untold Stories.
His first book,
"The Politics of Design" published in 2016
has been an inspirational source book for design students,
artists, and visual communicators,
and AIGA's very own Eye on Design Magazine has referred
to it as quote,
"The kind of literature that should be handed out
to all students on their first days at art school."
But today we're gonna talk
about his second book "Caps Lock", of course.
So I'm gonna turn it over to Ruben Pater,
who has a presentation prepared for us all.
Then I'll come back and host the Q&A
and incorporate your questions as well. All right.
See you all in a bit,
over to Ruben.
-: Thank you so much, Lee-Sean.
So this is like Michelle said my second book.
So why did they write this book?
So personally, my first book was really more
about how design and graphic designing particular,
visual communication is related to ideas about gender
and ethnicity and how these are communicated
to the stereotypes.
And this centered around the idea
of responsibility of the designer,
that designers who may perhaps are not people
that can be neutral, but I have to, yeah,
they have to take a position
because they have a responsibility of
the kind of visual communication that conduct in the world.
And from that book, capitalism
and ideas about like consumerism and advertising were
from the book, which was also pointed out by a few people.
And of course,
the reason why it was excluded for this book
was that I had no idea if it would be possible even
to write about this and it wouldn't necessarily,
of course I was fading this waterfall
you might produce first.
So after doing a lot of design projects,
I decided to get back into the writing
and decided to give it a go.
So I spent around three and a half years writing this book
because I wasn't really sure if it could be written.
The topic is also, yeah, kind of too big for one book.
You cannot write a book about the relationship
between capitalism graph design.
So the reason why I did it is because
through the writing process or reading process,
I found myself being very inspired
by examples of other studios.
And I came to kind of understand a little bit better
how design and economics are intertwined.
And I decided to do it in a way where I basically took
a structure where it has 12 chapters.
And I had the idea of going back and forth
between different roles of the designer.
And the reason was because I cannot be exhaustive.
I cannot discuss everything that has to do with design
and capitalism in one book,
is that all these different rules are basically rules
that the designer at some point in their lives
has to, or can assume in a production process.
So the first four chapters are basically what we know
is to kind of how to work of design means
that this is what usually is discussed in design theory
and writing about design,
how the work of designers themselves kind
of supports economic relations and also support capitalism.
So obvious examples are advertising and branding that sense,
but also finally the important to include more aspects
of design work, which is also how design selves also work,
how designers are bosses, educators,
amateurs, professionals.
So that's also about for example,
how we work and how we can work better.
And the third part is more the kind of strategies
that have emerged from the critique against capitalism,
that these ideas have been enforcing since the beginning,
that design was a profession,
things like social design,
speculative design, and design activism,
and how these internal can also be subsumed
or appropriated by capitalism.
And what are ways to kind of avoid this?
So the title maybe suggest
that I offer some kind of escape.
I don't do that.
Also don't see escape necessarily as an escapist thing,
I find it really important to understand
that we have agency,
political agencies as people who work
and people who kind of like are active in society
and in politics as all and more about that later.
So I'll go through a few of the chapters now.
The book is like 555 page so unfortunately,
I don't have the time today to go through the whole thing.
You can find some other lectures online
that will give you some other insights on other chapters.
First, I want to start with the designers.
Scribe was just kind of how it begins
and how economic relations and like notation
and graphic notation and graphic documents are related.
And this isn't basically the first image I started with
with my book,
because before there was a writing
there was already accounting.
So this is actually for Mesopotamia from 5,000 years ago.
This is from smith of beer.
At that time, there was no such fingers or writing system,
but there were already actually
these written documents done by skilled workers scribes.
For example, in this case, you see already, you know,
clear layout forms, you see alignment of numerals.
You see that the, also the numerals,
which all of course,
are handmade are also very consistent.
So it's actually quite skilled document.
There's also on the nine half by seven centimeters.
So it's not that big.
And what I think is important is the graphic documents
have a really important role in way economy functions,
because of course,
basically economy is a set of social relations.
I mean, people doing stuff together, you know,
whether we're aware of doing like a talk
or making food or where making the shoe
is like people together making stuff
is what economy basically is.
And if economy is done on a small scale, for example,
in a family or in a small community,
then documents are not needed because you can basically say,
oh yeah, by the way, I use this from you.
And can I have it back then and then?
And of course you don't need graphic documents
in this kind of small societies,
but the cities of Mesopotamia could be up to 200,000 people.
So if you have that amount of people,
you need to be able to trade with people
that you don't know, strangers.
So in that sense,
what you need this graphic documents,
because you might not trust that stranger
as you would a family member
or somebody that's close to you.
So we see near to graphic documents have one reason
to kind of making social relation abstracts.
And on the other hand also create trust
in the social relation and basically,
what was before the trust between two people
we know each other are now basically replaced by documents.
And we see the same thing with bank notes.
So this is the first year of being bank noted.
The first ones were made in China.
This is one from 1666 from Sweden
and bank accounts were basically, you know,
there was a rich man who had like a lot of coins in the bank
and he didn't want to take on these coins with him.
So the bank would like make great notes
that could be taken in instead of the coins.
And this is of course how bank notes started.
And now you already see that these kinds
of graphic techniques that are used here
are collect similar of the ones
that we see in banknotes today.
We see, you know, printing,
you have to have access to a printing press.
You have to access a certain type faces.
There are then an ornamental borderline around the document.
Dextrin can stay, but there's autographs.
And there's also these kinds of stems
that prevents it from being counterfeit.
So in the production and the design
of these kinds of graphic documents,
you see that this kind of enter counterfeiting
are a direct link with the idea of trust
because the documents needs to be trusted
in order to be believed by user.
So this using of graphic documents for economic trust
is I think very important in this kind of first world
to designer.
Now the abstraction of economic information
has now resulted also in this idea of that,
we use this kind of financial Excel sheets
for almost everything today.
This has become the facts of visual language of economy.
If you open up any financial newspaper,
you will see a lot of A4 graphics
and a lot of lists of a lot of numbers
and a lot of like stock quotes.
So we have become to learn that the language
of economics to graphic language
is the language of mathematics,
and of course, this necessary because
in our complicated economy,
we need to organize a complicated processes.
and for that,
we need mathematics in order to process that.
But what I also argue is that,
the fall starts when we only view economics
as mathematical issue,
and we only can kind of communicate mathematical
or economic information through mathematics.
Myself I've done a lot of anywhere reports
in the more than 10 years.
I worked at different agencies and for advertising.
And I completely understand,
I know this language from inside out,
but the problem arises when I'm a trader
and I'm looking at this desk and I see numbers,
I see profits, I see losses.
But what I don't see is behind every number,
there's a family,
behind every number there's a house.
Somebody is a family business.
There is maybe somebody in the hospital.
So all these kinds of social aspects
that are actually where those numbers come from,
are invisible, made invisible by graphic language
of mathematics and need for graphics.
And what could happen is that we lose sites
in the economic process of the social aspect
of what is essentially economy sense of social relations.
For example, in the 2008 economic crisis,
a lot of people were affected
and because it was a mortgage crisis from their homes
in the US.
That our entire neighborhoods where people were evicted
and more basically the houses were empty
while people were actually living on the streets
because the houses were bought up by investors
and were kept empty to make sure that I could
again gain their value before they could be sold again.
And now in a small community that makes no sense,
in a small community, you would not like, you know,
put the whole half of the community like on the streets
and keep the rest of the house closed to make profits,
that would simply not be possible.
But in the capitalist economy,
this is completely normal because the right of a property
is more important than the rights of a roof over your heads.
So what we see in the abstraction of economic information,
what happens is also becomes more and more and more easy
to be violent, to produce kind of violent behaviors,
such as gentrification, eviction,
and all these kinds of basically nonsensical things
that are actually, you know, just a production,
also one hand of this.
So an example that we can also do this differently
is this work by Gapminder in Sweden.
So Gapminder day,
they talk about statistics
and they basically have this website called Dollar Street,
where you can look at different incomes
of different families in the world,
but it's not just comparing numbers.
You see their family, their photographs,
you see how they live, you see their kitchen,
you see their car, you see their pets,
therefore these videos.
And you suddenly realize when I see the life
that these people need, you cannot just look,
think of people as a number or a number of income.
So I think a design can do a lot in kind of yeah...
in improving economic relations and also combating
the climate crisis and inequality.
Can do a lot of things of making economy more, again,
like a kind of social science
and also communicated more with social sensitive.
So the second chapter is the designer as engineer,
and which basically talks about the kind of standards
of industrial production
and how designers of course need standards.
Because, you know,
design started with the industrial revolution
and industrial production needs standards
in order to work effortlessly between different companies,
but also across borders.
But what we often forget is before we had standards,
there were also other stem has been stems were more local.
For example, this is the DIN paper formats.
They come from Germany and on are like the out
and most used paper standards in a world,
except obviously for the US
and the DIN paper performance, A4, A3, A2, et cetera,
came actually from the German industrial formats
and the norms, which was the DIN,
which came from the artillery production
during World War I,
that's needed to streamline logistics
between different producers.
And what you've seen this presentation
at the Leipzig stands in 1932,
is that it literally says norm formats help selling,
because the whole idea was that we standardized formats,
of course, also for more efficient production
to have less paper waste
but also to gear paper production towards businesses.
So it was a forest, the latter hats
that you as a format for the health law,
they have a format for the business cards,
they have a format for the poster,
they have a format for the leaflet.
So all these kinds of formats
were like predetermined for business.
And of course there was nothing wrong with this aspect
that makes it a lot easier to produce this
and but when you get rid of standards
and you standardize things across the globe,
they also lose some kind of local sensitivity,
for example, the king Ross rides and before the A4 formats,
you would having in countries
like France and the Netherlands,
you would have many different types
of paper formats often very local.
Paper formats would fit,
would actually differ actually per city
and paper formats would just come
from local production limitations.
But also in other examples, local stem escape,
a lot of cultural information as well.
So this is an example,
I really like these are Akan gold weights from Ghana.
So the Ghanaians economy was really based on
the trading gold dust
and to measure this gold dust,
though the weight of the gold dust,
they use these messy figurines that are extremely beautiful.
And they also realize that like every culture
had its own form of measurement,
which personally geared towards their local trades
and the local conditions and local cultural context.
So by seeing the world as one global economy
and standardizing everything globally,
we gear everything towards efficiency
and we don't take into account that industry
and production is also about culture.
It's also about what we produce together
and how that makes our lives meaningful.
And I also talk a lot about maps in this chapter.
What I think is really interesting about the maps
that were made during the colonial time
by the European conquerors was that maps
that we see these kind of maps,
mostly as tools of navigation,
that they were actually also investor relation promotions,
because these colonial voyages,
they could just simply not be paid for by states alone.
So the first stock exchanges in Amsterdam and in London
were meant to pull together money to make these long voyages
and costly voyages,
but often also fail will to make them possible.
So bankers and business men will pull in money
and buy stock for these companies,
but it was very important that these investors knew
that the money that they were spending
actually would come back and will benefit them.
So match were using the printing press
for actually massly produced too,
as an evidence of look we found this lands.
Now we own it.
And often the colonizers didn't meet set foot to the land,
but we're just mapping it from afar,
but it was already enough because according
to the enlightenment principles from Europe,
if land was not being used as efficiently
as in capitalist agrarian economy,
then it could simply be taken,
which was of course done in America on a large scale.
And then for stolen from the indigenous
and can see as property by European colonizers.
And mapping was like a way of solidifying that property.
And this is a form of evidence towards the investors.
I think also it's important that a lot
of indigenous mapping practices have been lost
and over time, and also due to the way that
this has been eradicated by colonizers from Europe.
I also show a different kinds of mapping practices.
This is from Iconoclasistas from Argentina 2018,
and they use mapping in know kind of more collective way
where they do a lot of mapping workshops with people
and they still use European kind of mapping organization
that they try to suffer it's at the same time,
they use mapping as a kind of empowering full
for people rather than the tool of domination
and a tool that is just merely used
for the evidence of property.
So the second, the third one,
I want to discuss it in the designer as brander.
And of course, brander comes a little bit closer
to probably, yeah.
The practices that you do.
For example, I've been working mostly
with corporate identities and branding was basically
most of my design career until now.
Well, what I find interesting about branding
is that of course brands have always existed
as marks for merchants or for guilds,
or even for cities, or, you know,
the kind of quest for nobility that Knights were using.
But when you look at the kind of grocer
from the 1800s,
you actually see there's actually very little branding
in terms of products.
A lot of products were bulk that were just the, you know,
like beans or rice or flour.
There were just taken as bulk without brands
and also products like soaps were often unbranded.
So there was branding, but it was still quite limited.
And of course,
industrial revolution gave rise to this branding practice
because now suddenly the relationship between
the person who makes the products
and the way it could be sold
was actually not the same anymore.
And this kind of workshop idea from the medic evil times.
So designers were asked to defend these narratives
that would actually,
that we actually needed to sell these products
and give them some kind of like our app,
because there, which was lost from this kind
of identical production line.
But of course now we have kind of gone.
We have like accelerated this in such an extent that,
I mean, in the supermarkets, in my town,
there's like 18 different types of peanut butter, you know,
so we have a type of wastefulness
and the type of like abundance of products
that is basically,
it's not any more about just meeting simple the man's needs,
but it's also about creating more and more desire.
So this might seem like the kind of victory of capitalism
and the victory of the abundance of choice.
But of course, if we look closer,
we see that most of the products are actually owned
by a few multi-nationals
that control so much at food markets.
They also prohibits a lot of action that, you know, well,
we'll actually be better for the climate crisis
to stop the climate crisis.
So a lot of these companies are making it very difficult,
for example, to produce more organic food
or to produce more sustainable
because they have a lot of control
about what supermarkets do.
And it's the natural form of monopolizing
that you see in capitalists, in a way capitalism operates.
And of course now we see that brands have become
so much more that,
brands have completely been disconnected from production,
even companies like Apple and Nike,
don't even produce things anymore.
Legally they only produce designs and ideas
because the production is outsourced to contractors
in low wage countries,
to boost profits and to increase the attention
for the brand itself.
So what we see as the idea of Braxton failure comes
very interestingly in the squad from 1992, by Phil Knights,
who wrote that for years,
we thought of ourselves as a production oriented company.
So he's the CEO of Nike,
but now we understand that the most important thing
is to market the product.
So companies like Apple and Nike have basically become
marketing companies and production is actually not even part
of their day-to-day business because it's all outsourced.
So brands in themselves become like the most important thing
about the product when the product itself
is just like a detail of that.
And also we should be reminded the word branding itself
has a very horrible history.
You know, it comes from a burning a mark
into a living being in this case, a cow,
but also during labor time, slaves were branded.
And of course you will colonial time.
So this idea of this branding,
I mean the Dutch East India Company
that did a lot of slave trade,
actually it had hold guidelines about how slaves
should be branded.
And this idea of turning the human into a commodity
through this kind of practice of tortures
still kind of always like,
I think an important aspect to remind ourselves of branding
and these words by Hank Willis Thomas
makes like this really interesting connection
between how we show branding today
and also the history of branding itself.
And this idea that you can just brand,
giving something value by branding it,
that creating a commodity out of branding.
It's you see also with things like water,
something that should be available to every human being
for a very low price or even cheap,
even water can be branded,
as you see in this, you know, in this case,
and for something that is publicly accessible, like water,
you know, like oxygen, like sand, like housing,
like all these kinds of things
that we kind of feel as a human right in order to turn them
into commodities
and to not have them publicly accessible anymore,
we need branding.
This is where designers come in.
They create this narrative that this is not just,
you know, water,
this is this kind of water.
This is not just, you know,
this is not just education.
I know this is this kind of branded education.
You see the same thing with the city
and with the city branding, where of course,
you know, starting with Milton Glen,
his famous logo in 1977 until like I amsterdam
from castle screamer in my own city, you know,
we see of course as need logos can create a lot of prides
among people living in the city.
And that can create a positive boost in identity.
But of course,
cities already have identities
that don't need to be designs.
And what we see in all of these cases,
that's the people who gave the assignment
for these logos wants more wealthy people to the city.
They want to attract,
use the logo to attract more investors to the city.
And they also want to attract more wealthy tourists
to the city.
And it was most the case.
And I love New York logo and I absolutely a member
and in both cases there are two large processes
of gentrification,
which is pushing, black people out of the city
and making the city a wealthier place.
So the city government would get more taxes and more income
and would have more money, you know,
so we should be really mindful of how these processes
are, can also be violent,
even though as a designer yourself you're,
if you're involved with this practice, you know,
you might not see that at the first glance,
because like I said before, if housing is a market,
if housing is commodity rather than a right,
then we see this kind of strange things
that we have seen right now in Amsterdam.
There's a really big housing crisis.
We have a doubling in homelessness in the last 10 years,
and we are one of the richest countries in the world.
And there's just simply people who have more than 5,
600 own 5 or 600 houses.
You know the way that something that is naturally scarce,
that you create a commodity out of it
and excluding people from using it literally creates,
you know, people living on the street,
creates instances of poverty.
And there's always like branding
and aspects of design like surrounding these like practices.
And I think we should be very aware
of the designers role in those. All right.
So far I've been mostly talking about the kind of objects
that designers make and how those objects actually boost
and supports economic relations and capitalist economy.
So branding, documents, maps, and all these things,
but what's often left out when we discuss design
and we'll often talk about designs objects,
we don't not so much talk about the designer as worker.
What is it to work, to be a worker,
to be a boss, to be an entrepreneur,
to be an educator, to be a students,
to be an unpaid intern,
to work overtime, to work late,
to do unpaid spec work.
And these aspects are, I think,
essential to understanding the designer's role
in capitalistic art.
You know, because I mean, this is how I grew up
and how I also have a strained at school is that you,
you believe that it's like a calling,
like being a designer is something you do
because you love it.
This is a passion.
And, you know, you should be so happy
that you are a designer.
You can do design work.
So these items we'll most likely accept
almost any exploitative working condition,
working weekends, working nights.
I've done all of these things except the unpaid work,
unpaid internship.
And I think these are the kinds of things
that are really now,
especially now that a lot of designers automated
the more and more like a lot of ex designer,
but also the signs sooner or later will also be outsourced.
We'll also have platforms like Fiver.com
where people already have a race
to the bottom among freelance giants,
where it's not so much a question of how
this can be stopped,
but more of a question is how can we get organized
in order to prevent like designers completely
getting burnouts and getting depressed,
because this, you know,
and this supposed to, by entering Morel,
that's just like a real classic among designers
and also really beautifully designed
is also this kind of message that we have
to really think carefully off is how do we communicate
work and working conditions towards each other?
Because if one or two designers become very famous
and workers in museums
and they can make a good living
and have a really good practice.
What about all of the other designers who, you know,
have to do banners for UX design or have to do, you know,
shitty jobs or have to do jobs that they don't like,
just because they, you know,
have to pay back their debts from their expensive design.
This is for example, a book for our Facebook employees.
So a lot of this narrative also comes from Silicon valley,
you know, "The Quick Shall Inherit the Earth".
The idea that you have to be faster, faster, faster,
and that you can basically, because these angles,
your passion, your best,
we have to accept all these kinds of conditions.
And we should also be reminded that it's not just work.
It's a, we have to be on Instagram.
We have to be on behalf.
We have to make our portfolios.
We have to be available by chat, by Email,
on the weekends, on evenings.
And this is taking it's all.
There's like a lot of more research done now
about like things like burnout and depression
among designers,
along of designers also work more than 40 hours a week.
And I think it's really important to understand
that this kind of competition that you know,
the designer should only compete with one another
and, you know, only the best may win.
And the rest of us will basically have to do
either really crappy job,
or just even hoping we can get a job at all.
It's not really a healthy working environments.
So a lot of designers have already said,
we should go to more of kind of an ecology
in the design work towards care and not competition.
So to take a little bit better care of each other around
rather than to only see it as a rat race,
where only a few people can make a lot of money
and gets value from design work,
because whereas all this yeah,
hard work leading us to design.
So this is a famous graph from the economic policy institute
about your neighborism.
So what we see here is we see since 1948,
the average productivity,
which is basically how much you produce per hour rights
has gone up and up steadily until now.
Wages until like the 1970s have also gone up,
parallel to debts.
But then we seen the 1970s with Neo liberal policies
implemented by the old Reagan in US,
Margaret that's your new UK.
And later in all the other countries in Europe
and in many other countries in the world,
we see basically that's, you know,
a lot of production what's outsourced.
The power of unions was broken.
Unions could not so well fight for better wages
is that basically wages have stagnated.
So people have to be working harder and harder,
but they haven't been paid more and more.
And I think an example from my own personal life is that
for example, my parent's generation
with a working class job,
you could actually support a whole family
and have a house with a yard.
Now today, this is simply impossible,
simply in a city like Amsterdam,
if you even want to buy a house,
you have to be with two people who have a really high paying
job, which is not a design teacher or designer work,
but like a really high paying job
in order to even afford a house.
So we also see that, you know,
working is literally valued less and less,
but whereas all this hard work going
through that we're just mentioning,
this is the CEO-to-worker pay ratio,
also by the economic policy institute.
In 1965, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 20 to 1,
today it's 310 to 1, you know,
so we see a rising and rising inequality.
So where it's just all this hard work of designers
and many other people going to,
it's going to richest 1%.
So this is where we have to reevaluate why we work so hard.
And if it's really making us happier,
or just making somebody else wealthy,
also important in the discussion about labor
is what is work.
We often think work is something you do in an office,
is done for specific kind of jobs,
but it's usually not inclusive of things
like taking care of your children,
cleaning your house, cooking foods,
which is actually the most important work in society
because we stopped doing this work society
would collapse right?
This was also work that primarily done by women,
especially in the 1960s and '70s.
And this is a post about See Red Women's Workshop,
which is a feminist design collective from the 1970s.
And this place is really well,
is that "Capitalism depends on domestic labor".
It needs people to do free work,
like cooking and cleaning and taking care of children
in order for the male breadwinner to be a designer,
to be a worker or to make money at their work.
So when we address the nature of work,
working healthier,
working better,
being about care and not about competition.
We also have to include work
that is not considered work right now.
There's also things like community organizing,
taking care of the sick,
taking care of the elderly.
A lot of this super important work
that is actually not valued in society.
You're gonna put it in your resume.
You don't get paid for it, but yeah,
without it, society would collapse.
And we've seen during Corona like how
the most important jobs are the least paid.
You know, so the way that the jobs are valued
and it works valued in society should be radically
I think that resisted and also reevaluate.
Because in the end, you know,
work doesn't have to be like this.
We spend more of our waking time with our colleagues
than with our family.
So why not enjoy it?
Why not spend it in a more enjoyable manner?
So part of the work is also the idea
of the designers amateur,
who is a designer?
Who can call themselves a designer as a professional?
And who is considered not a designer
but an amateur or craftsman, et cetera.
This also calls,
I took also this chapter because I'm also speaking of course
by invitation of the AIGA,
which one of the best traits organizations for design.
And this was also about the nature of design work.
Now, the great thing about traits organizations to stay.
They were really enforcement
at a moment of spine where majorly,
nobody appreciates its design and artistic aspect of design.
You know, design production for example,
we look at the steps printing office from the 1580s
was a working class job.
It could not be taught at schools.
There were no textbooks.
You would learn it in a workshop environments,
usually in a kind of family environment.
And the production design was done under one roof.
And of course, artists were treated very differently.
They had academies starting with the Renaissance,
but these items were usually still seen as Crosslands
and as working class jobs.
The first kind of traits organizations came from the UK,
following the arts across movements
and over you wanted to,
and I think there was a really important
every graphic designer knows how difficult it is
to explain how important graph design is,
you know, even explaining to a client
or a family member.
People usually think design,
they can do themselves in Photoshop.
So like emphasizing the importance of design,
of the craft of design.
It was something that the first,
like this Guild of handicrafts,
but also AIGA fonted in 1914 had a really important role
in kind of forwarding, you know,
having also creating value that these animals
also be better and would also be valued.
And it would also be seen as an artistic profession.
But I think over time,
this kind of professionalization has really come
to be around, you know, do you have the design degree?
And do you have the design work?
And if you don't have the design degree
you don't have excess to paid design work,
you're using the scene as an amateur.
And this also can become a very exclusive way
of looking at design,
especially because when we look
at these design school records for 2019,
we see a lot of these like highest ranked design schools
are actually really expensive.
These are accessible various small parts of
the population of the world.
You know, always you have to pay more
than $50,000 a year for tuition.
I think that makes design education only accessible
for the wealthy, unless you have access to a scholarship.
This is not in every country,
some countries have free or very cheap design education
that education has become,
for example, in your urban more and more expense,
and would every extra dollar that people have
to pay to go to design school,
then there's always parents who cannot afford that.
So when design only becomes a profession that can be done
by the wealthiest, let's say 10% of society,
then designers also represent the values
of these 10% wealthiest individuals.
And this is something that we have to be watchful for.
Especially designers are responsible
for visual communication to all members of society.
And that doesn't even include, of course,
the fact that many people in the world don't have access
to design education or paid design work.
A lot of vernacular design,
a lot of a design that has maybe seen as craft.
For example, here this ladies basket Weaver
is usually not seen as a design but as crafts,
but that's a highly exclusionary method,
especially if we want to kind of disconnect
this direct link with the industry.
If we see design as an intrinsically human activity
that is done by many more people,
not just people who call themselves designers,
then I think design can also kind of really benefit
from that by being more inclusive
and more open to more socially,
let's say sensitive work and not just work that is done
for multinationals for new industry,
because now we see what kind of projects, you know,
get design awards and what kind of projects
are failures in design.
It's mostly seminars around, you know,
big companies and designers who have to Grish work
from these companies by famous studios.
And I think this is something
that can be challenged more and more.
Another aspect I also want to highlight is that
professionalism should never get in the way of ethics.
These are people from the Dutch new system
during World War II during the Nazi occupation
that are falsifying papers.
So remember, I was talking before about economic documents.
Now designers make these documents.
So they also are perfect for falsifying those.
Graphic designers in Netherlands were given a choice
by the Nazi occupations.
Say if you want to receive commissions
from the government which was actually substantial amount
of design work at the time,
then you have to pledge allegiance to the knots machine.
And if you don't do that, you won't get paid for it.
You will get commissions.
There are most designers did that.
Then there was also designers who refused that
and went underground and went to do (indistinct)
the dangerous work of helping people that had
to escape Jewish people
and poor people or people that had to do forced labor
to provide them with identity papers
so that they could actually stay in the Netherlands.
So I think what is professional
and what is demanded of designers
by a political mandate or by corporation is not necessarily
always the same thing as being ethically just.
So I think every individual,
not just designers should always be mindful
of their own kind of idea of what is ethical
and what's unethical.
All right. So finally, this my last chapter,
designers as activists.
So I don't really end the book with a kind of idea,
like because of course this is only a few of the chapters
that I say these are all of the things
that could be improved about the design work,
how we design,
how we design together,
but also how design work is produced and is valued.
But I don't think it's my place
to give like a definite answer,
like this is where we should go,
or this is the nuke depth design,
because I can only speak from a Dutch perspective
from the Netherlands and in every city,
in every country,
in every region,
different kinds of strategies and ideas are necessary.
But what I do is I actually found many collectives
that I found very inspiring that have done, like,
let's say anticapitalist,
or have tried to organize an ethical practice
or have in some way or another try to resist
only two kind of work for the markets
and go form this markets conditions
in this kind of competition.
And these are in the last chapter.
So I'm gonna talk about a few of those,
and those really inspired me.
And those are for me a kind of like final note to end with,
which for me also a positive note
and also a note that I'll hopefully
also support you with your practice.
But I think that designers activist also kind
of a goal to why did I write this book in the first place?
Because I think we have situations right now
that to require more than just, you know, yeah.
A little bit greener, a little bit more ethical behavior
on behalf of the designer.
We have now 2000 billionaires who have more wealth
than 60% of the world's population combined.
And we know, especially during Corona,
this inequality is growing and growing.
We have 700 people that still go hungry a regular basis.
And this amount is also growing since 2014.
So we see a rising inequality, a rising world hunger,
and that's of course at the same time
we have the climate crisis.
We just had the some aids in Glasgow,
which of course ended up in projecting
even higher temperature rising was already predicted.
Nothing is showing that this is going the right direction.
And I think also not just as designs
but as citizens we have a responsibility of thinking
about the world that comes after us,
I'm not just about if our life is going to be okay,
but also if the life of people who come
after us is going to be,
if they can live like a respectful
and then a life worth living,
you know, in three, four, five decades.
And what we shouldn't do is what's already being done
is just make some kind of corporate message
and a little bit more inclusive
or a little bit more environmentally friendly.
This is like falls in the category of pink washing,
green washing, cost washing.
And I think as designers,
we have to be really resist cooperating with this
because of course the easiest thing to do
is a lot to do anything about the practice of your business
that just to change the image.
Just to change a logo and just change in branding.
There are some interesting developments I think
that we can learn from there are unions.
This is the Alphabet Workers Union done
by people work at Google.
And I think if people at Google can do it,
designers can do it too.
Maybe union sounds old fashioned,
sound like something from the '50s and '60s.
For me, it's not normal in the Netherlands
to be part of a union it's considered very outdated,
but if we want to improve the work of designers
and not see all the design work as a form of competition,
and we need to organize, you know,
we need to get together as designers
and talk about what kind of practice do we want,
not just what do clients want from us,
but how do we want to get paid?
We don't want to do unpaid spec work anymore.
We shouldn't allow unpaid internships anymore.
And in order to do that,
we really need to create like a bigger organization
in terms of not just from trade organizations
but also in union type of organization,
that we support each other.
The UK there's a really interesting example.
Now, the United forces of the world,
which is the Designers and Culture and Workers Union,
inspired by this gig economy deliver rule,
this kind of like food delivery and Uber drivers.
This is like a trade union,
and also is inclusive for freelancers.
I think this is very important because freshly,
especially freelancers have to do deal
with really low dollars at the moment.
And I know in the Netherlands,
a lot of freelancers have a hard time in making ends meet,
but a lot of things also cooperatives.
A lot have been written about this,
actually recently would have,
which I think is very positive.
As long as we understand the cooperative
in a way that it's a business without bosses
or people get valued equally for that time,
everybody in the company gets valued equally for our time.
And also things I've discussed with everybody
in the company.
And if it's done according to these seven principles,
I think it can be very interesting way
of working towards more ethical
and also more grounded Darien forms
of organization of design work.
One of those collectives is a Cooperativa de Diseno,
from Buenos Aires, in Argentina.
I think Netherlands is really amazing to work a lot
for feminist collectives that work a lot
for the pro-abortion movements.
And what's also interesting is there are
in this big metal factory impact,
which was a factory that was actually bankrupt in the 1990s,
but it was actually still making a profit.
So workers just took over the factory
and now it's run as a cooperative as well.
So the worker cooperative is also a clients
for the Cooperativa
and what they do also in UK is as many design
and printing collectives also help each other with work
and help each other, like sustaining each other.
So I think that could create a really interesting network
of different cooperatives around the world
that are not based on the profits alone
and not based on kindness, you know,
making the boss the wealthiest person in the office,
but really to see a little bit how we can work better
together in a more military way.
Media Ninja from Brazil is really amazing.
I had the fortune to visit them like five, six years ago.
They're a large media activism organization,
gainful effect that's in Brazil,
five families, basically on all of the media.
So there was this protest during the Olympics
for basically were not covered
by any of the traditional media.
And they took it upon themselves using cell phones
and live streaming to start these kind of citizen activists
and the citizen journalism,
they're leaving collective houses.
There are over 2000 members in their collectives.
They have their own currency.
And I really found a way to be activists, but also to work.
And I think it's really inspiring what they do.
You know, it will, you know, how they work is,
will not make you wealthy and will not make you famous.
That's the people who worked for them and with them.
They really appreciate the way that their day lives.
So if you weren't willing to make these kinds of sacrifices,
I think really amazing example of how to work differently
also with less money, and to also do more activist work.
Open Source Publishing is from Belgium, from Brussels.
I think there are really interesting
because are not a co-operative,
but because they only work with open-source tools,
they don't work with Adobe.
They don't work with Mac books,
they don't work with any proprietary software.
So they do a lot of things with programming themselves,
but it also use a lot of dead office
or software that's around.
And what I really like about them is they really see design
as is something that's practiced collectively.
Culture is created collectively.
And I really resist this idea of copyright
that I can just, as in business, you know,
write the patterns or claim a right
to a color or to awards
and then people have to pay me if they use it,
because that's also quite recent invention, you know,
and work that's made. Yeah.
Before that basically falls outside of the category
and damage basically fair game
and for a lot of freelancers earners also corporate right
doesn't work because they just don't have access to lawyers.
Copyrights works for companies like Urban Outfitters,
which we have so many lawyers that can just steal
from fashion designers in such a way
that they can legally get away with it.
And what Open Source Publishing does it tried
to practice this kind of copy left idea
within design, by for example,
putting all of their designs for the first moment,
for the first sketch to the final result,
all of them alive,
they are processed completely from this parents.
All they make a lot of fake faces
when they put a line for free
and they write a lots,
they share a lot about what they do and how they do it.
So I think, and if they'd been doing for 50 years,
and I think it's amazing that they really showed
that this grating culture collectively,
and then having culture accessible for everyone
and not something you can put a fence around
and, you know, one person that makes it that face
can be very famous and wealthy
and other people can not get by that.
We can think about that design also more
in a way where, you know,
value is more shared among designers
and more work and more,
instead of like defining what is mine or what is yours
and more working together and more like,
this goes for software development.
More like, yeah.
Allowing other people to take their work further,
which I think is amazing.
So this is my final collective.
I want to share this, the public from Toronto in Canada,
they are a group of community designers.
They're all people of color, queer and trans people.
It's important because this also shapes their experience
and how their experience shaped their work.
They really focus on community design,
but when they came to this community called Parkdale,
which we're now part of,
they also realized, yeah, but if we come to this community,
but there's already a lot of design creativity
in this community.
So why don't we switch from designing for people
is facilitating creativity by other people.
So they ended up doing a lot of workshops,
facilitating others people creativity in the area,
do a lot of community organizing
and making design a part of that.
They have in the building,
you see the mask they have on the bottom.
They have a gallery where people
in the neighborhood connection with them work.
And what's also really nice is that
they were talking to me about how, you know,
design is always often complicit to gentrification.
You know, a design studio moves you to a neighborhood
that is cheap and the design studio creates a
or artist studios the same way
they make this a neighborhood, somebody cool.
And then the designer leaves.
And then of course, properties are more valuable,
poor are pushed out of the neighborhoods.
And then the identification process basically
replaces people have little means by wealthy people.
Which has been a very violent process in many cities.
So in order to prevent this from happening,
they are involved in many community activities
against gentrification, but also they said,
we're gonna stay here.
This is our community.
We're not gonna, you know,
go to the next school community that we can find,
but it's for us really important
that we stay in this community.
And we dedicate like our lives,
our creative work to this community.
And I think that's,
yeah, that's I think very brave
to make that kind of commitment.
And it also shares a little bit of how being closer
to your own community as a designer,
you're not only designing for, you know,
a multinational or a museum on the other side of the world
is maybe not the best way to, you know,
get likes on Instagram, or to get like not a value.
It took a lot of appreciation for your work
in the design press,
but maybe it will make your work more meaningful
and ultimately it will make your work also a more pleasant
as a designer.
So that's my story for now.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Here's some more information if you want to read,
I'm gonna turn it over to Sean now.
-: Great. Thank you so much, Ruben,
for that presentation and for writing this book,
I think I really appreciated how you historicized design,
helping us understand how design plays
this role in shaping human relationships,
whether it's cultural or economic,
but also offering these alternatives at the end with these
different cooperatives and other sort of organizations.
I see some great audience questions.
I'll actually go straight to those
and kind of group them together.
There's a general one.
That's just about your own practice,
which we eluded to in the intro at the beginning.
But how do you negotiate this with your own clients,
especially after writing a book like this
and how do you balance out some of the practicalities
of paying the bills versus doing this kind
of maybe anticapitalist or ethical work.
-: Yeah. Now I, so that's a very important point.
I'm also an educator.
So my also, because during the writing in the book,
I wasn't able to do a lot of design work.
I was mostly busy with the book and teaching,
that I live a modest lifestyle.
I don't spend a lot of money.
So my teaching engagement,
which only one or two days a week,
again, to support my basics,
which makes me less dependent on pace design work.
You know, so that's an important distinction
that I have to make.
So this is also why there's six collectives
are named after the end of the book
are essentially more exemplary than my own practice
because they do a lot of work.
I find it for myself also because I'm in this position
because I found teaching very, yeah,
it's one of the most rewarding things I do.
That's it's allows me to...
because whatever I do on top of that,
which are now usually projects that are instigate myself,
and I do some kind of like crowdfunding
or some way of getting that, like finance,
basically by asking for donations by all these things.
So try to work cheap,
trying to work with local printers,
local producers,
and working towards like forging local relations
rather than thinking about yeah how to you know,
be more famous or make more money.
And another thing that for me,
it's very important now is to be more active
with activist organization.
So yeah, in activist organizations,
there are like a lot less money, but there are some money.
So this is what I've currently been doing.
I'm working for example,
with extinction rebellion and other organizations.
And that's been really fruitful also
because that really kind of expands my own area.
But like I said,
that's like a privilege of my own position,
which I had to work very long at at studios
and do different jobs before I could come to that position.
But I also see designers like brave,
who helps in Italy or who find this way of doing
more community oriented work by also moving
to a cheaper place because living in a city is expensive.
And if you make sure that you are, you know,
you're there.
If you say hi, do we need to go on holiday?
I don't need to take me strands Atlantic trips.
I can live more cheaply.
That also allows you more freedom in the work that you do.
But I understand that in every culture
and every country in every situation,
people have a different agency from their own perspective.
-: Got it.
Well, thank you for sharing that personal perspective there,
we have a couple of questions about design education,
which you touched upon a lot
in the designers worker chapter,
Matthew wanted to know what can designers do
with their expensive degrees to make sure
that design still stays in house
or it doesn't get outsourced.
Is there anything we can do as designers
to resist some of these forces?
-: Yeah. I think that, yeah,
the process of automation and the process of outsourcing,
if you also look at other areas of the economy,
I don't think it's something that they
can be resisted very instantly.
I think what would work
and what I've also said in the talk
is that organizing collectively will at least give us
the opportunity.
For example, to sit down with hundreds of these analysts
and share our experiences,
what do we need?
What are the problems that we facing every day?
Do we need, you know, better rules about unpaid
you know, unpaid spec work, I'm paid internships.
How can we, you know,
rates of toxic elements in design,
and this will be a long journey,
but I think starting with, for example,
your own personal, for example,
what I now do is I don't want to work
with printers outside of the Netherlands.
You know, this is for me a very important choice.
So I think everybody can make these kind of choices,
producing more locally or not doing certain kinds of,
you know, not working for certain kinds of clients.
And the more people kind of do this and talk about this
I think the stronger we stand,
because if one designer says I don't work for that company,
they'll go to a lot of person.
But if 800 designers in the city say
we're not gonna work for that company
because that company does things for this government agency
that we don't agree with,
then you have a different story, you know?
So a collective,
I think the power of organizing,
the of power doing things together can be very useful
in resisting some of these kinds of living large forced.
-: Thank you. Alexa has a question
about how you incorporate environmentalism
to your design practice.
You've mentioned working with extinction rebellion,
working with local printers
and paper producers in the Netherlands.
Can you tell us a little bit more
about how you're incorporating the environmental
in your design work?
-: Yeah, obviously it's a question for fashion
and product designers is a lot more pressing.
I think it's also good in the design process
to come out saying there's low design,
doesn't come to be design.
I think, what we have to resist as a design brief always
has to culminate in an object.
I did many rebrandings for many companies.
I did that for 10 years.
Now almost none of these rebrands are still there.
All of them have the rebranded
or merged with other companies.
And now I realize how wasteful that work has been
because when we do a rebranding often,
it's just that the company affairs,
new affairs different or more marketable,
but there's in fact hasn't changed any
of their toxic behavior.
So for example, saying to a company look,
you're asking me for restyling,
then maybe you should just stop doing this.
Maybe we should just, I don't know,
facilitate discussions between people in the company,
maybe some of the issues that you're trying to solve
with this rebranding can be done very differently. You know?
So if you expand visual communication,
to the extent that's, you know,
communication that any brand or any corporation
or any organization has to do with basically facilitates
communication between people then maybe. Yeah.
And this is, of course I know it's very difficult
because design lease can be very limiting, you know,
but I think ideally I would argue that we have
to work towards a design practice that is really more about,
you know, the good stuff,
about addressing a communication issue
rather than, you know, we need this color to change.
We need this logo of change in that place
because usually get that becomes a more, yeah.
A more wasteful form of design think.
-: Yeah. I think we have time for a couple more questions.
Darren in the chat wants to know Ruben,
you've identified as an anarchist
in previous talks and appearances.
And he's interested in how your research
for "Caps Lock" has maybe changed
or evolved your own political views.
-: Yeah. I'm not completely 100% sure
if I'm only an anarchist,
I think I'm interested in anarchist
because it doesn't really want to put
like a political ideology onto the world,
but it let us assess that people everywhere
in the world are free, you know,
organize their own kind of political structure
as long as you know, is it is you got to Darien,
you don't discriminate against certain ethnicities, genders,
certain people with effort.
So this is very important,
but that has been a journey through "Caps Lock".
So writing this book for three and a half years,
actually properly to. Yeah.
More appreciating some ideas from anarchism.
I also have some issues with anarchism.
So I don't want to,
this is also why I don't perform this
as some kind of answer, you know,
anarchism is known to be an ideology
without being an ideology.
You know, it's love the idea and that this is first
I'll do our people.
It's more about that people can kind of organize
their own political agency.
And so the thing that I appreciate is that anarchism,
but also other ideas of socialism are really nice
because you can already start.
You know, for a long time,
I was voting every four years for the Green Love party
in Netherlands,
but yeah, I've done it throughout my life
and nothing changed.
And, I still vote, I think voting is important,
but I think besides voting,
we should also understand we have political agency
as people who are employed
or people who have children
or people who are in neighborhoods.
So what I like about this kind of local organizing
and I'm involved in different or different organizations,
not just in anarchist ones and an extinction rebellion ones
is that, I think it's really important
that you can just already start practicing,
let's say more ethical forms of politics every day,
just by your neighborhoods are with the people around you
and not just wait every four years for politicians,
but it's a very personal note,
not something that's necessarily part of capsula gushy dads.
-: All right, thanks.
I'm gonna give the last question to Camille,
coming back to design education.
Camille wants to know how do you think we can talk more
about design and ideology in design school?
So the kinds of topics you address in "Caps Lock",
it seems often taboo or something forbidden.
-: Yeah. I mean, I think I also want to avoid staying like,
oh, everybody should talk about this
or read my book
or discuss this in art school.
Because if, for example,
in Netherlands art school is only four years
and, you know, developing your own, you know,
idea of the world, your art aesthetics,
your conceptual framework is already so much.
You have to doing this four years.
And then within that,
we have UX design,
you know, dyed design.
We have all these,
we have book design and we have all these sub disciplines
within graphic design that also needs
to be taught and learn.
So yeah, in order to make this an education
more politically sensitive I would say,
so discuss the responsibility of the designer,
I think is really important that I wasn't, you know,
taught when I was going to design school
is important that I think that means design education
should also have more time, you know,
because if that also takes time away
from other things that we're doing, you know,
I think still think that design should (indistinct)
and all their basic things.
So I also want to avoid, you know,
putting more and more pressure on design students
who are already under so much pressure.
And I hope that's going to be, you know,
now I think that as a design student,
if you're just, I dunno,
maybe invited students or you know,
you see a bit of that during your education,
you can always explore more
and maybe others are not so interested in that.
And they don't even have to, you know, engage with that
if they don't want,
I don't want to, you know, push that onto students
or people at school.
-: Yeah. Well, I'll help promote for you.
If there are any design educators out here,
I do recommend this.
If you wanna assign it for your classes,
it is a long book, but it's very readable.
And I found it accessible to get into some of the history
and the economics in a way that's accessible
to a general audience.
So thank you Ruben again for the presentation today,
for all the great audience questions
that we couldn't get to today,
but hopefully you'll connect directly with Ruben
or read the book
and then connect with Ruben at Untold Stories.
Also an announcement that apparently artbook.com
is sold out of the book right now,
but they'll restock soon.
So you can use the AIGA member 25 code when they restock
or visit your local bookstore and check it out there.
There's been some examples in the chat.
So thanks again,
have a great afternoon or evening morning
wherever you are in the world.
And we'll see you at the next AIGA event.
Thanks again, everyone.
-: Thank you so much and have a nice day.
-: Bye.